Hi David,

Perhaps there is more food always available in millions of square miles of rain-forest than in a desert.

Boom and bust affected many Aboriginal groups in two ways:

* the daily search for food and water: whatever you could hunt or fish, had to be eaten fairly quickly, and that may be it for a few days;

* the periodic droughts across, and in different parts of, Australia - some lasting a decade and more and covering a million square miles of country - would have quickly had the animals moving out as soon as the water was hard to find, which would have meant that people had to also move quickly, leaving behind the old women and young children. A wide-area drought, like the current Queensland drought, may have caused entire groups to die. A ten-year drought would have meant a fifteen-year gap in the birth-rate. One drought in around 1200 AD lasted thirty two years.

Paradoxically, after settlement and the introduction of the ration system, droughts would have made no difference to the life-chances of old people or young children: in such times, even able-bodied younger people were supplied. So there would have been no interruption to the flow of births, no sudden infant mortality or elderly mortality. Everybody would have survived, and on their own country. Not only that, but instead of periodic (and often drastic) cuts to the population, numbers would have actually grown during droughts. With everybody gathered loosely near ration depots, ritual and story would have been assured as well, instead of people scattering to the four winds.

Joe

Dear David F.,

Of course it is nonsense in our present day
for most of us.
Unfortunately there's still some people though who prefer
to live with the anachronisms of the past.
And that is the point that was being made.

Dear Joe (Loudmouth),

The reference in my post was to prejudice and
discrimination - two diferent, though related,
phenomena: attitudes and behaviour, and the way
in which prejudiced thought always involves the
use of a stereotype.

otb,

The information about common Australian attitudes -
that I gave earlier came from a history text book
for students describing certain attitudes in this country's
history.

For example like the language of the pub-crawling,
hard-working, dim-witted Aussie - portrayed by Paul Hogan
that gained popularity. "You drongo,"
or "He's a galah," became the accompaniment of the
traditional "bloody bastard."

The suburban life, and well being of Australian society became
the butt of many jokes of those times, and the intolerance towards
"new Australians," and "coloureds" was sent up as an unjustifiable prejudice.

It wasn't until the 1970s that the Ocker Aussie was packaged
for world consumption in films, but once done,
the exaggerated image of "Bazza (Barry) Mackenzie" became
one which many Australians were no longer so proud of.

This critical self-consciousness had become more and more apparent
and forced both politicians and the public to revise not
only policies but also many of their long-held and cherished
notions about themselves and the rest of the world.

Dear Joe (Loudmouth).

You may enjoy the following website (just for fun):

http://itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2012/04/reasons-positive-stereotypes-are-not-positive/

We're told that "positive stereotypes are assumptions about an
entire group or identity - eg. gay men..."
They're supposed to be artsy, friendly, fun, social,
well-spoken, well-dressed-well-groomed, fit and sassy.

That's a pretty tall order for anyone to fill.

What if you're none of those things and you're gay?

What about black people who aren't good at sports,
or who can't dance like Sammy Davis Jr., or a woman who isn't
caring, and the list goes on.

Interesting article.

Dear Joe,

The figure of 17 hours a week is pertinent whether the tribal people live in a rain forest or desert. The Bushmen in the Kalahari desert still spend about 17 hours a week to provide their sustenance. Unlike our society with its uncontrolled population increase tribal people use abortificients and other methods to keep their numbers under control.

http://www.heretical.com/bjerre/aborig2.html describes one method by which tribal Aborigines keep their numbers down. Unfortunately missionaries have interfered with the practice.

Dear Joe,

I could not find the source for my statement of 17 hours a week. I will ask my son about it.

However, I did find this in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer.

At the same conference, Marshall Sahlins presented a paper entitled, "Notes on the Original Affluent Society", in which he challenged the popular view of hunter-gatherers lives as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short," as Thomas Hobbes had put it in 1651. According to Sahlins, ethnographic data indicated that hunter-gatherers worked far fewer hours and enjoyed more leisure than typical members of industrial society, and they still ate well. Their "affluence" came from the idea that they are satisfied with very little in the material sense. This satisfaction, Sahlins said, constituted a Zen economy.[25] Later, in 1996, Ross Sackett performed two distinct meta-analyses to empirically test Sahlin's view. The first of these studies looked at 102 time-allocation studies, and the second one analyzed 207 energy-expenditure studies. Sackett found that adults in foraging and horticultural societies work, on average, about 6.5 hours a day, where as people in agricultural and industrial societies work on average 8.8 hours a day.[26]

Recent research also indicates that the life-expectancy of hunter-gatherers is surprisingly high.[27]

@Foxy, Tuesday, 9 June 2015 6:21:30 PM
and
@Foxy, Monday, 14 April 2008 7:05:24 PM
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=1668&page=4

Xerox?

Your prejudice against 'white' Australians has you stuck in a rut.

Still, that is one of the distinguishing features of self-loathing leftist elitism.

I have already posted evidence that dispel your sad, unwarranted and biassed negging of Australians. My earlier post refers,

onthebeach, Tuesday, 9 June 2015 3:10:21 PM
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=6871&page=24